Robert Bauval
Malaga, Spain
Thank you to my wife Santha and to our six children Sean, Shanti, Ravi, Leila, Luke and Gabrielle, who have given me so much solidarity, love and support over the 19 years this book has been in the making. I’m really grateful to my Dad, too, who read the whole manuscript during what turned out to be his last summer and took the trouble to give me many helpful comments and suggestions. He passionately disagreed with many of my views on the Christian Church, but we agreed equally passionately that life has a spiritual meaning and that it does not end with the grave.
Graham Hancock
Bath, England
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
1. The Benben stone of the pyramid of Amenemhet III displayed at the Egyptian Antiquities Museum in Cairo.
2. François-Édouard Picot's 1827 painting on the ceiling of Room 30 of the Louvre: L’Etude et le Génie dévoilent à Athènes l’Antique Egypte.
3. Statue of Giordano Bruno at Campo dei Fiori in Rome.
4. View of the ‘octagonal ellipse’ in the Piazza San Pietro.
5. Sully Wing Room 26: this is the room that most symbolized the ‘sacred’ union of Anne of Austria and Louis XIII.
6. A Knight Templar, showing the croix pattée that characterized order, and the octagonal frame within which it can be imposed.
7. ‘Here is seen the very ancient goddess and queen of the Egyptians’, etching from the fifteenth century.
8. Coat-of-arms of Paris, fifteenth century.
9. The coat-of-arms of Paris commissioned by Napoleon in 1811, showing Isis on the prow of the boat and her star, Sirius, leading the way.
10. A reconstruction map of the region of Paris before the city was built, showing the location of the Temple of Isis (where the Abbey of Saint-Germain-des-Prés now stands).
11. Occitania. Inset shows relevant portion of modern France.
12. Aerial view of the Louvre looking east.
13. Aerial view of the Historical Axis of Paris looking west from the Louvre towards La Défense on the distant horizon.
14. Sunset on 6 August along the Historical Axis (Champs-Élysées).
15. Winter solstice sunrise at Karnak-Thebes along main axis.
16. Sunset on 6 August along the Historical Axis (Avenue de la Grande Armée).
17. View of the Grande Arche looking east.
18. Equestrian statue of Louis XIV as ‘Alexander the Great’.
19. Revolutionary etching showing Voltaire and Rousseau introducing the Supreme Being to the French people.
20. The ‘eye in the pyramid’ on the frontispiece of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen.
21. The reverse motif of the Great Seal of the United States.
22. The so-called ‘Fountain of Regeneration’.
23. A ‘pyramid’ outside the Hôtel de Ville in Paris in honour of the Supreme Being.
24. An etching in the journal Le Franc-Maçon showing the Empress Joséphine in her Masonic regalia.
25. Head of Cybele/Isis found in the St. Eustache gardens.
26. A goddess placing the imperial laurels on Napoleon, and at his feet another goddess wearing the tourelle of Cybele/Isis.
27. The goddess Isis on the façade of the Louvre looking east at the rising sun in the Cour Napoléon.
28. The Loge Bonaparte.
29. Revolutionary etching showing Napoleon introducing the Supreme Being to all religious groups.
30. The ‘missing’ obelisk at the temple of Luxor.
31. The obelisk of the Concorde that once stood outside the Luxor Temple.
32. The genie of Paris (or Liberty) on top of the Bastille Pillar.
33. Pyramid project proposed by the revolutionary architect Étienne-Louis Boullée: Cénotaphe dans le genre égyptienne.
34. The baroque ‘pyramid’ proposed for the Louvre for the centennial celebrations of the French Revolution of 1789.
35. The glass pyramid at the Louvre.
36. Aerial view of Paris and the Historical Axis from the Louvre to the Grande Arche.
37. Aerial view of the city of Luxor in Upper Egypt.
38. Aerial view of the Louvre and the Seine.
39. Aerial view of Luxor temple at Thebes.
40. A typical Cabalistic ‘Tree of Life’ or Sephiroth.
41. Plan proposed by Sir Christopher Wren for the city of London.
42. John Evelyn's plan for the city of London.
43. The east-west alignment between Temple Church and St Paul's.
44. The obelisk of Thutmosis III on the Victoria Embankment, London.
45. H. H. Gorringe at the dedication of the New York Obelisk in 1881.
46. The alignment between St. Paul's Cathedral and Temple Church.
47. The George Washington Masonic Memorial in Alexandria, Virginia.
48. A model of the Lighthouse of Alexandria (Pharos).
49. The entrance to the elevator in the Washington Monument designed as that of an ancient Egyptian temple.
50. Statue of George Washington in full Masonic regalia at the Washington Masonic Memorial.
51. The Masonic foundation-laying ceremony for the New York Obelisk in 1880.
52. Sun setting along the axis of Pennsylvania Avenue on 12 August, also the day of the heliacal rising of Sirius.
53. The interior of the Egyptian room in the Grand Lodge of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.
54. George Washington in his Masonic outfit laying the cornerstone of the US Capitol.
55. The Freemasons of Washington, DC, parade towards the George Washington Masonic Memorial for the laying of the cornerstone.
56. The Statue of Liberty.
57. A typical Masonic symbolic rendition of ‘Solomon's Temple’.
58. The ‘Ohio Historical Marker’ showing the Masonic layout plan for Sandusky.
59. The original city plan of Sandusky, Ohio.
60. Pierre L’Enfant's plan for the city of Washington, DC.
61. The pentagon symbol of the 32nd degree of the Scottish Rite.
62. The pentagon of the 32nd degree showing the five ‘Masonic armies’.
63. Aerial view of the Mall in Washington, DC.
64. Overhead view of the Pentagon building near Washington, DC.
65. The ‘Dome of the Rock’ mosque on Temple Mount in Jerusalem.
66. The Balfour Declaration, 2 November 1917.
67. President Harry S. Truman in Masonic regalia.
68. Truman's letter recognizing the legitimacy of the state of Israel on 14 May 1948.
69. The Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York City.
70. Accusation of a Masonic-Zionist plot for the millennium celebrations at the Giza pyramids in the (now banned) newspaper Sawt al-Shaab.
71. A Masonic lodge in Cairo, Egypt, circa 1940.
72. The millennium celebration at the Giza pyramids, 31 December 1999.
73. The ‘sacred rock’ inside the Dome of the Rock mosque in Jerusalem.
74. The Knights Templar surrendering to Saladin after the Battle of Hattin.
75. View along Pennsylvania Avenue towards the Capitol.
76. The rising of Sirius at Washington, DC.
77. The setting of Sirius at Washington, DC.
78. The US Capitol.
79. The Washington Monument.
80. DARPA’s Information Awareness Office logo (now abandoned).
81. The headquarters of the Scottish Rite in Washington, DC.
Preface:
The Master Game
Man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Le Contrat Social
There is one thing stronger than all the armies in the world; and that is an idea whose time has come.
Proverb
“What is the Master Game?”
“Who is playing it?”
“Where? How? Why?”
“And which side is winning?”
INTRODUCTION
TH
E GAME OF GAMES
For a very long time there has been a belief, sometimes widely held and proclaimed, sometimes held only by persecuted minorities, that we humans are here on this planet to nurture and perfect our souls – and thus to equip ourselves for immortality.
Those who hold such beliefs usually also believe that negative spiritual forces are at work amongst mankind – evil angels who seek to lead us astray and divert us from our true path.
It is irrelevant whether any of this is ontologically true. All that matters is that it has been and continues to be believed. Such beliefs, built around a concept of antagonistic forces – Darkness and Light, Good and Evil – battling for the human soul are bound to have been acted upon by those who held them strongly.
In this book we will explore a number of mysterious ancient documents, prominent amongst them the so-called Hermetic Texts, written down in Latin and Greek in the early centuries of the Christian era. In one of these texts the god Hermes (the Greek counterpart of the ancient Egyptian wisdom god Thoth) delivers a prophecy to his pupil Asclepius: Do you know, Asclepius, that Egypt is an image of heaven, or to speak more exactly, in Egypt all the operations of the powers which rule and work in heaven are present in the Earth below? In fact it should be said that the whole Kosmos dwells in this our land as in a sanctuary.
And yet, since it is fitting that wise men should have knowledge of all events before they come to pass, you must not be left in ignorance of what I will now tell you.
There will come a time when it will have been in vain that Egyptians have honored the Godhead with heartfelt piety and service; and all our holy worship will be fruitless and ineffectual.
The gods will return from earth to heaven; Egypt will be forsaken, and the land which was once the home of religion will be left desolate, bereft of the presence of its deities.
O Egypt, Egypt, of thy religion nothing will remain but an empty tale, which thine own children in time to come will not believe; nothing will be left but graven words, and only the stones will tell of thy piety.
And in that day men will be weary of life, and they will cease to think the universe worthy of reverent wonder and worship … Darkness will be preferred to light, and death will be thought more profitable than life; no one will raise his eyes to heaven; the pious will be deemed insane, the impious wise; the madman will be thought a brave man, and the wicked will be esteemed as good.
As for the soul, and the belief that it is immortal by nature, or may hope to attain to immortality, as I have taught you – all this they will mock, and even persuade themselves that it is false.
No word of reverence or piety, no utterance worthy of heaven, will be heard or believed.
And so the gods will depart from mankind, – a grievous thing! – and only evil angels will remain, who will mingle with men, and drive the poor wretches into all manner of reckless crime, into wars, and robberies, and frauds, and all things hostile to the nature of the soul.1
Against the onset of such dark times – and there have been many dark episodes in the past two millennia – we demonstrate in this book that certain groups and individuals have always stood prepared to act. These daring and valiant people knew from the outset that their resistance might put them in extreme danger and would require much sacrifice, even the willingness to die. They also knew that their task might take a very long time, spanning several generations, centuries, perhaps even millennia. But it was the only game really worth playing for upon the outcome depended nothing less than the spiritual redemption of mankind.
Today covertly directed from Washington, DC, the ‘Master Game’ as we have come to see it has evolved into nothing less than a grandiose scheme played on the world stage to bring about a ‘new world order’. Let us be very clear from the outset, however, that this book is neither a ‘conspiracy theory’ nor a compilation of such theories. Our objective is solely to make sense of historical events, particularly events of recent times, that have rocked the very soul of humanity.
Yet the Master Game was not easy to recognize and comprehend, not least because it drew inspiration from a distant golden age set in far away places. This was when groups of carefully selected men and women, neophytes and adepts, were carefully initiated into a high gnosis to equip them with great intellectual powers that would enable them to guide and direct society along the path of virtuosity and enlightenment. This is why it will be necessary for the reader to journey with us to the very source of the ‘Game’ and unhurriedly be ushered through the secret routes and alleyways that infiltrate great social and religious reforms, the birth of the state of Israel, and finally the hideous episode of 9/11 and the ongoing military and political mayhem that it set in motion.
As investigative writers with one foot in the Western world and the other in the Arab world, and also as historians opting to dig deep under the veneer of established history, we have become increasingly and disturbingly aware that the Master Game has taken a rather strange twist over the last sixty years or so. Indeed it is our conclusion that it has now lost sight entirely of its original objective and, far worse, could be leading mankind towards an Armageddon of biblical proportions. To put it bluntly, there is a very dangerous and extremely strong social and political undercurrent in one part of the world that is building up largely unnoticed, and that is about to blow, like an overheated giant pressure cooker, into a gruesome clash of civilizations.
For hundreds of millions of Muslims (and even in some Christian and Jewish communities) there is a weird perception that a Masonic-Zionist-American plot, hatched back in the early 1900s (but not implemented until the 1940s), has been devised to take over and control the Arab world from Washington, London and Tel Aviv. This perception on the one side, whether based on facts or falsehoods, is perilously misunderstood on the other side by the Western world as a whole. Our findings show that the Master Game is not only being played by a set of new players having very different rules of engagement but also using very different game-boards. In simple terms, the Master Game has stopped being a battle between oppressed and oppressors, between the forces of evil and the forces of good, and has transmuted itself into a dangerous collision of two cultures who see the future of the world in very different ways.
From the time of the Italian Renaissance in the 15th century, the Master Game began to change from direct physical confrontation with the powers that be (of the kind that took place during the Cathar ‘experiment’ – see Part I: The Secret Faith) to something much more subtle and insidious – a form of symbolic warfare that would assail the establishment secretly and stealthily from within. This new approach would not use conventional weaponry, or military forces, but rather a special gnosis known only an elect few. Like camouflaged commandos operating under the cover of darkness these elite, initiated insiders would place powerful ‘intellectual time-bombs’ in the very heart of their unsuspecting oppressors, set to detonate at propitious moments. Continuing through the Enlightenment of the 17th century, the great social upheavals of the French and American Revolutions of the late 18th century and finally down to our own times, it is not an accident that top architects, town planners, and even sculptors and artists have been busily changing the urban landscapes of major cities – principally in Rome, London, Paris and Washington, DC – by strategically locating monuments and buildings that seemingly evoke ‘Masonic’ ideologies and symbolism. Their objective or, more aptly, that of the Masters has been to erode and finally eliminate the iron-hold of the Church and the monarchies and to establish a new world order based on seemingly ‘Masonic’ ideals.
We have made it our task to understand whence these ideas originated and also to attempt to define the true purpose of these strange urban developments. To this end we have found it necessary not only to undertake a sort of ‘intellectual archaeology’ of history but also to self-initiate ourselves into an ancient and very potent way of thinking which, for want of better terms, we have dubbed talismanic thinking.
In our many years of
research into ancient cultures and, more specifically, their powerful symbolic art and architecture, it has slowly dawned on us that the true language of humans is not, as we previously thought, the spoken word but the ‘silent language’ of symbols and signs that ‘speak’ directly to the mind and the soul of a person. And although everyone knows that a symbol is an image or an object that represents something, few are aware that some symbols can be converted into extremely powerful intellectual instruments that can have devastating effects on large huge numbers of people by charging them with intoxicating ideologies and stirring emotions. When a symbol, whether a tangible object, monument or building, or whether an intangible idea or logo is thus charged, then it becomes a talisman. Think of the Christian Cross, the Star of David, the Islamic Crescent or the Nazi Swastika and the disturbing effects such talismans have had throughout history and you will begin to get the gist of this elusive Master Game.
The Master Game Page 2
